The Dish

He hasn’t endorsed it, but he’s flirting with it. If a leading Republican presents a serious proposal to slash corporate welfare, end agricultural subsidies, reform entitlements, wage war on pork with the veto-pen and abolish much of the IRS with a flat tax, designed both to protect the poor and  to remove all the tax shelters for the very rich, then a lot of people like me are going to feel more comfortable with the GOP. Keep it up, Rudy. And you might just put the Reagan coalition together again.

(Photo: David Paul Morris/Getty.)

A reader writes:

I don’t consider myself a conservative of any stripe, but I am trained theologically and a regular reader of First Things, and I’m refreshed by Christian conservatives who aren’t marching to the beat of the First Things drummer.

Nevertheless, of all the things you might agree with Bush about, I hope you’ll reconsider your commitment to the possibility of "pure evil". This is among the least theologically orthodox concepts that Bush has invoked. For the classical theological tradition, everything that exists is good, full stop. "How do we know that God loves sinners?" asks Thomas Aquinas? "Because there are sinners."  God does not create evil creatures or natures. And nothing else "creates" in the technical theological sense of that word. Evil must therefore be the lack or corruption of something good rather than the presence of something purely or intensely evil. 

This strikes many people as counterintuitive. I’m fine with that. Incarnation and Trinity aren’t simple, straightforward reflections either. But you can witness the power of the logic by rereading Augustine’s Confessions  or City of God. In the latter work Augustine tries to imagine the most wicked creature he can think of – he invokes the mythical figure of Cacus, a big nasty creature who eats anyone who gets near him. Even Cacus, concludes Augustine, seeks peace.  Even Cacus wills what he wills under the aspect of some good. Sin does not destroy nature. "Evil cannot wholly consume good" (Augustine, enchiridion on faith, hope, and love, cited by Aquinas, Summa Theologia, Part I, Q. 48, sed contra).

There is a vital practical significance to the classical view. Since we can’t reduce our enemies to pure blackness, we have to take them seriously as creatures of God whose evil willing is nonetheless always done under the aspect of some good. Even the suicide – the classical hard case – wills evil for the sake of the good of some peace, namely, being free from the distress of life. Even Bin Laden wills what he wills under some aspect of the good. Even Bin Laden wants peace of some sort.

Amazingly, some neoconservative Christians seem to make nihilism a genuine option in the world. As if one could actually will nothingness. Thus the neoconservative "remedy": annihilate the terrorists. As it turns out, this just makes an entire people feel backed into a corner and spawns more terrorists. It would be far more constructive to try to find some way to connect with that aspect of the good under which even the vilest of offenders are doing their evil deeds. For Bush, there is one path: kill the evil terrorists. This is the cul de sac of the new Manicheaism. But there are other options: get rid of the military bases in the Middle East; treat the terrorists as an international criminal conspiracy that requires international collaboration at the level of policing and prosecuting (like drug dealers and mafia syndicates); seek a genuine solution to the Palestinian crisis.

Here’s a legal analysis of what just happened in the David Hicks case. Money quote:

The crime Hicks pleaded to, providing material support to terrorism, is a felony triable in regular federal courts, but not a law of war violation military commissions can lawfully try. The inclusion of this offense in the MCA could allow future commissions exercising hybrid jurisdiction over law of war and statutory offenses to try acts committed after that law was enacted. But retroactive jurisdiction is only permissible over acts clearly violating international law at the time they were committed. Jurisdiction over Hicks, whose conduct dates back to 2001, would be unlawfully ex post facto. The Government bears the burden of proving that this offense violates the law of war, for which I have found no precedent in five years of academic research into military justice and the law of war. If the commission lacks jurisdiction over the charge, any court reviewing the decision per se, or Hicks’ subsequent incarceration, should be obligated to set the conviction aside or order his release from custody.

I’m not qualified to make a legal judgment on this, but felt it worth passing along. Glazier believes the case may be a serious blow to the recently legislated military commissions law.

The editor of Time said the following on the Chris Matthews Show last Sunday:

"I am so uninterested in the Democrats wanting Karl Rove because it is so bad for them."

Ana scratched her fair head, as one would. Why uninterested? Why bad for the Dems? Stengel replies:

As a citizen, I think it’s unfortunate and perhaps short-sighted for Democrats to be perceived as focusing on the past rather than the future. If people see the Democrats as obsessively concerned with settling scores, that’s not good for the Democrats or the country.

Norice the subtle shift from partisanship to citizenship in that final phrase. Count me somewhat unconvinced on this minor revision. But count me even less convinced on the major point. The machine Rove has constructed is surely very interesting to cover, especially if it has been corrupting the justice system. One might imagine that the role of an opposition party is exactly to scrutinize those in power. One might even believe that a scandal a few weeks old isn’t exactly the past. And one might even think it’s the job of the media to inspect it. But then one wouldn’t be editor of Time, would one?

Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1 pm.

A reader writes:

Your honest neocon wrote:

"What the leftist and media critics get wrong about Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush is that they screwed up by going in halfhearted and without demanding real sacrifice upfront from the American people."

I think what your reader fails to recognize is that the premises on which the selling of the Iraq War was based were the only ones that could have been successful in convincing the public. I have long believed that most Americans did indeed have justifiable uncertainty about the true threat the Hussein regime in Iraq posed to America. At the same time, they were assured that no significant sacrifices by citizens were warranted, since we would be "greeted as liberators". Thus, even if the threat proved less significant than was advertised, war would be "worth it," since the cost would have been relatively insignificant.

An honest assessment of the potential costs balanced against a potential threat about which there was much uncertainty would have likely produced a level of public support insufficent for intervention in Iraq. The goal was intervention in Iraq (I make no accusations of conspiratorial motivations for this), and the only means by which the goal could be achieved was precisely the means the administration and war supporters outside of government used.

Honesty would have led to better policy. Someone alert Cheney.

"So, David Blankenhorn, I see your three marriage radicals and raise you three!" Dale Carpenter helps defuse the latest attempt to discredit the argument for equal marriage rights from David Blankenhorn.

It is very strange to hear some theocons describe marriage rights for gays as a product of the radical left. I remember the battle within the gay rights movement over marriage. Believe me, many on the left were against it.

Welcome to the future of advertizing.

She needs to lay off the beef, apparently.

Department of kleptomania.